Director of Wellcome, UK
Jeremy Farrar is the Director of Wellcome, a global charitable foundation which supports science to solve urgent health challenges. His whole career has been dedicated to protecting and improving global health. As a researcher he specialised in infectious diseases, and he has published more than 600 papers. He holds degrees in immunology and medicine from University College London and a doctorate in neuroimmunology from the University of Oxford. Jeremy spent 18 years leading the Clinical Research Unit at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, where he made many pivotal advances in the understanding of diseases like tuberculosis (TB), malaria, typhoid, dengue and influenza, as well as helping to train scientists from across South-east Asia and beyond. He joined Wellcome as Director in 2013. As part of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Farrar is a member of the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), the UK Vaccine Taskforce and the Principles Group of the ACT-Accelerator hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO), and he chairs the WHO R&D Blueprint Advisory Group.